A description of Retpoline, a Google-developed binary patching technique which protects against the bugs and claims to have almost no performance penalty (I have no insider information here, I’m quoting the doc): https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01 ... cpu_4.html

Re: Meltdown/Spectre

Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned arse, but the idea of the CPU running code that it hasn't (yet) been explicitly told to run is horrifying to me.

Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned arse, but the idea of the CPU running code that it hasn't (yet) been explicitly told to run is horrifying to me.

It'd be fine if Intel didn't design their CPU architecture as Linus Torvalds gracefully phrased it, like 'shit'.

It'd be fine if Intel didn't design their CPU architecture as Linus Torvalds gracefully phrased it, like 'shit'.

Let us note that Mr Torvalds has spent the last 20 years writing kernel code to take advantage of the performance gains provided by that exact CPU architecture and hasn't had cause to complain until now.

Let us note that Mr Torvalds has spent the last 20 years writing kernel code to take advantage of the performance gains provided by that exact CPU architecture and hasn't had cause to complain until now.

Maybe he was running with the assumption that Intel's CPU would appropriately protect restricted kernel memory areas?
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Meltdown / Spectre like flaws on the Xbox 360 chips -found and resolved a long time ago (interesting read)

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2018/ ... -xbox-360/

That's almost as good as when Gaywood posted about it!

Here is the summary of what we have found so far:

With Windows 10 on newer silicon (2016-era PCs with Skylake, Kabylake or newer CPU), benchmarks show single-digit slowdowns, but we don’t expect most users to notice a change because these percentages are reflected in milliseconds.

With Windows 10 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), some benchmarks show more significant slowdowns, and we expect that some users will notice a decrease in system performance.

With Windows 8 and Windows 7 on older silicon (2015-era PCs with Haswell or older CPU), we expect most users to notice a decrease in system performance.

Windows Server on any silicon, especially in any IO-intensive application, shows a more significant performance impact when you enable the mitigations to isolate untrusted code within a Windows Server instance. This is why you want to be careful to evaluate the risk of untrusted code for each Windows Server instance, and balance the security versus performance tradeoff for your environment.

Does it have jumpers?

Pro tip, the software is balls, and none of the other lighting options look as nice as the default, so just leave it as it is out of the box.

This is making me laugh, for some inexplicable reason

A post with text will be fine

"It's a PC. It's red. Now it's blue. Now it's red. Now it's orange."

If it doesn't do UV-C, I'm not interested.

After a decade on Macs, I am Back On My Bullshit. Edit -- and you've known me long enough to remember when I used to build PCs

I think what I was finding most amusing was your apparent glee with all of it.

It has about a hundred LEDs. It’s going to be tasteless as fuck and I already love it.

You might as well go down that route as there's no way of making a desktop PC look stylish in any way.

You might as well go down that route as there's no way of making a desktop PC look stylish in any way.

Sometimes, before I go to bed at night, I just look at my PC for a minute or two in a darkened room before shutting it down.

Sometimes, before I go to bed at night, I just look at my PC for a minute or two in a darkened room before shutting it down.

That's only because you always have autotrader open in Chrome.

People shut down their PCs?

Why leave it running overnight (if you're not downloading something or serving content up)?